You plan on a laptop, because a big screen is the right tool for deciding where to go. Then you ride with a phone, because that is what is in your pocket.
Joining those two up has always been the tedious bit. Email the GPX to yourself and dig it out of the attachment. Plug in a cable and go hunting for the right folder. Push it through a cloud drive and wait for it to sync. Send it to yourself on a messaging app and watch the app rename it, or refuse it, or quietly convert it to something else.
Send to Phone is new in PitStopper, and it replaces all of that with a QR code.
How it works
It lives in the Export menu, in a group with the other ways of getting a route somewhere.
Choosing it opens the same export dialog you would get for a download, with the phone as the destination instead of your Downloads folder. GPX or FIT, starred or flagged POIs only, the filename, and everything under Advanced options: it all behaves exactly as it does for a file you save.
That is deliberate. The file that reaches your phone is byte for byte the file that would have landed in Downloads, off the same builder, with the same options applied. There is no separate lightweight phone version to be surprised by later.
Press the button and you get a code.
Scan it with your phone's camera, or any QR app. There is nothing to install and nothing to sign into on either device. If you would rather not scan, Copy link gives you the same thing to paste wherever suits.
What the phone does with it
The link opens an ordinary web page, which fetches the route, decrypts it, and saves it.
Then you open the saved file, and your phone's own "open with" chooser does the rest.
That last part is the reason one link reaches everything. It covers the apps that open a route file - Cruiser, Locus Map, OsmAnd, Organic Maps, CoMaps - and also the ones that only accept a share, like Komoot and Garmin Connect. We are not maintaining a list of supported apps and hoping yours is on it; we hand the file to the phone and let the phone offer whatever it has.
It took two failed attempts to arrive at something that plain. An Android intent that would launch the map app directly worked in theory and not on a real phone. So did handing the file straight to navigator.share. Saving the file and getting out of the way turned out to be both the simplest thing and the only one that worked everywhere.
On an iPhone the order is slightly different: save it first, then share it out of Files. The dialog says so rather than letting you find out.
It tells you when it has landed
A QR code that sits there whether or not anything happened is a small anxiety. The only way to find out is to try the link, which destroys it.
So the desktop asks. While you are looking at the code it is quietly checking, and it says "your phone is fetching it" when the download starts and this when it is done:
The QR and the link disappear at that moment, because they no longer work. A used-up code left on screen is an invitation to scan it again and conclude the feature is broken.
The privacy bit
The route is encrypted in your browser before anything leaves your computer, and the key that unlocks it travels in the part of the link after the #, which browsers never send to a server. So the relay that carries it holds bytes it cannot read, and neither can we. Same design as Share Project.
The link works once and expires ten minutes after it is made. That also means the QR code is a secret while it is live: treat it like a password, and do not project it onto a wall.
Not to be confused with
Two other entries sit next to it in the Export menu, and they answer different questions.
Send to PitStopper App moves an entire project - route, points of interest, notes, offline map tiles - to our own companion app rather than to somebody else's. It works the same way, QR code and all, and it is still in alpha because the app that receives it has not been published yet.
Share Project is the one people most often mean instead. It makes a link that anyone can open, as many times as they like, for as long as you choose. What arrives is not a file at all: it is a copy of the whole project loaded into PitStopper in their browser, fully editable and theirs to keep. That is what you want for sending a plan to the people you are riding with, or for picking your own work up on another computer. You can see how many times a link has been opened, and revoke it early.
| What arrives | Who it is for | How long it lasts | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Send to Phone | a GPX or FIT file | your own phone, once | ten minutes |
| Send to PitStopper App | the whole project | your own phone, once | ten minutes |
| Share Project | the whole project, in a browser | anyone, any number of times | 1 day to 2 months |
All three encrypt in your browser and keep the key out of the server. The difference is who is meant to open it, how often, and whether they end up with a file or with PitStopper.
Send to Phone is the one for right now, and for whatever map app you already use. If you want the stops as well as the route, Export POIs only will give you those as a separate layer, and Cruiser and Locus Map will read them as proper searchable categories.
To get a route onto a bike computer rather than a phone, the GPX or FIT download is still the way: most head units want to see a file over USB or through their own app.
